Browse Themes (5 total)
Crisis and Community: The Revolution divided families and towns
Communities throughout western Massachusetts united to resist the British government in the years leading up to and during the Revolution. Townspeople formed committees, drilled minutemen companies, gathered supplies and raised money for the war effort. These same activities also divided towns and even families. For staunch loyalists like the Stoddard family of Northampton, the Revolution was “more like a civil war" and little Solomon Stoddard was bullied daily for being “the son of a tory” as he walked to school. Patriots celebrated the arrival in Deerfield of a Liberty Pole in 1774 while a young physician recorded in his personal journal just who sawed it in half under cover of night. Longmeadow men convinced that their long-time neighbor Samuel Colton was guilty of price gouging broke into Colton’s store to seize his inventory of sugar and West Indies rum. African American and Native American residents encountered daily the glaring contradictions of calls to resist tyranny in a society that condoned and supported chattel slavery.
Crisis and Community: the Revolution divided families and towns
Communities throughout western Massachusetts united to resist the British government in the years leading up to and during the Revolution. Townspeople formed committees, drilled minutemen companies, gathered supplies and raised money for the war effort. These same activities also divided towns and even families.
Living Histories: Memory making and the Revolution
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The Will of the People: Personal stories of sacrifices and hopes of the Revolution
The American Revolution was at its heart a grass-roots event. Local histories reveal how the Revolution occurred at the local level as people and communities debated and put into practice new ideas about a government of and by the people.
Whose Revolution?: Little-known stories of diverse perspectives
Often unknown outside their communities, local histories give voice to myriad, diverse histories of individuals and groups often marginalized or left out in traditional histories of the Revolution. The faces of revolution included the poor as well as the well-to-do Americans; people of color, both free and enslaved, of Indigenous and of African descent; indentured servants and apprentices; women, children, loyalists, and prisoners of war.